Ellen > Ellen's Quotes

“Most of all I want to read books; books thick as a brick, leather-bound books with incredibly thin paper and those purple ribbons to mark where you left off; cheap, dusty, secondhand books of collected verse, incredibly expensive, imported books of incomprehensible essays from foreign universities.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“We are battered and broken, but we’re all small miracles.”
― Jodi Picoult, Wish You Were Here

“We forget that light, without shadow or variation, is blinding.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“When you were young you were afraid of ghosts, and when you were aged you called them to you.”
― Alice Hoffman, The World That We Knew

“So many things she would have done differently. Regret, she has found, is the loud thing that’s left.”
― Laura Spence-Ash, Beyond That, the Sea

“I sometimes wonder if it’s better for the bad things to happen all at once rather than little by little, like blood seeping out of a wound. When they happen all at once, if the shock of it doesn’t kill you, you might at least stand a chance of rearing up and fighting back. But when they come on you slowly, one thing creeping after another, it wears you down so that you might as well be dead when they finally end, because you have no strength left to resist.”
― Patricia Falvey, The Yellow House

“But only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always, and always thus will be.”
― N H Kleinbaum

“If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand.”
― Alice Hoffman, The World That We Knew

“reminded myself that you must do the thing you think you cannot do,” she said simply. “Always. And generally you find out you can do it, after all.”
― Kate Quinn, The Diamond Eye

“When you leave a stone like this, even for a person you never knew, you’re asking God to add this name to His sling, so they’ll count. They’ll never be forgotten. And He will watch over this soul, always.”
― Kimberly Brock, The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare

“How presumptuous is the gift of life? What arrogance is implicit in the act of love that calls another into existence? This world, my love, I give it to you. All of it. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“So do not live in the future, cariño. Don’t play the first match in Melbourne months before you’ve gotten there. We don’t know what kind of player you’ll be that day.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Mine is a complicated story, and people do not want to hear complicated stories. They want simple stories, in which people are either good or evil, and no one good ever makes a mistake, and no one evil ever repents.”
― Cassandra Clare, Chain of Thorns

“Bad things happen to the best of people, and we cannot let them overwhelm us. Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“—” by Rudyard Kipling. If you can meet with triumph and disaster And treat those two impostors just the same”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“Being old, he had come to realize, was like being stuck inside an enormous museum with hundreds of rooms, each crammed full of artifacts from the past.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.”
― Kate Morton, Homecoming

“There’s nothing more personal than a book, especially one that’s become an important part of someone’s life.”
― Barbara Davis, The Echo of Old Books

“The written appreciation and understanding of literature, or any kind of artistic endeavor, is absolutely central to a decent society. Why d’you think books are the first things that the Fascists burn?”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“And the March is a liminal place,’ she said almost to herself. ‘A border, between one thing and the other. Like a river or the edge of the sea. A place where magic happens, where people disappear and wizards and prophets and poets feel at home.”
― Barbara Erskine, Sleeper's Castle

“What shapes us is not always our achievements but our omissions. Not lies; simply the truths we don’t tell.”
― C.J. Tudor, The Chalk Man

“One of the great injustices of this rigged world we live in is that women are considered to be depleting with age and men are somehow deepening. But”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“We think we want answers. But what we really want are the right answers. Human nature. We ask questions that we hope will give us the truth we want to hear. The problem is, you can’t choose your truths. Truth has a habit of simply being the truth. The only real choice you have is whether to believe it or not.”
― C.J. Tudor, The Chalk Man

“Beneath the veneer of adulthood, beneath the layers of experience we accrue as the years march stoically onward, we are all still children, with scraped knees and snotty noses, who need our parents…and our friends.”
― C.J. Tudor, The Chalk Man

“Books are feelings,” he replied simply. “They exist to make us feel. To connect us to what’s inside, sometimes to things we don’t even know are there. It only makes sense that some of what we feel when we’re reading would . . . rub off.”
― Barbara Davis, The Echo of Old Books

“Without a reader, a book was a blank slate, an object with no breath or pulse of its own. But once a book became part of someone’s world, it came to life, with a past and a present—and, if properly cared for, a future. That life force remained with a book always, an energetic signature that matched its owner’s.”
― Barbara Davis, The Echo of Old Books

“The number of lives we are capable of living is limited only by the number of books we choose to read.”
― Barbara Davis, The Echo of Old Books

“I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books.”
― Barbara Davis, The Echo of Old Books

“To be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow